by Anna Burke
Table of Contents
Titlepage
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Six Weeks Later
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About Bywater
For El, who fought for a better world
and
for Tiff, who stayed by me through these woods
In the year 1194, Duke Leopold V of Austria imprisoned King Richard the Lionheart as he was returning to England from the Third Crusade. The tax levied to pay his ransom nearly beggared the kingdom.
Chapter One
The roar of the crowd drew Robyn away from the narrow side streets, made narrower with market stalls crammed with the last of the autumn harvest and a scattering of hopeful chickens. She’d been on her way to the fletcher’s shop, but the noise emanating from the town square drew her toward it like a lodestone. Dread tightened her stomach. She picked up her pace, taking care to conceal the limp rabbit hanging from her belt beneath her cloak. Killing a rabbit hardly constituted a crime, but she wasn’t about to give the sheriff another excuse to breathe down their necks. She saw Old Widow Gable hobbling down the street ahead of her, elbowing her way through the outer fringe of the assembly, and above her gray head rose the gallows, ominously empty in the chill fall air.
“What is it?” she asked the older woman as she caught up to her. Widow Gable glanced sideways at Robyn from beneath the tattered corner of her headscarf, and the corners of her eyes crinkled with dark amusement.
“Don’t let the sheriff catch you looking so guilty, Robyn Fletcher,” she said. “Now put those young elbows to good use so we can find out.”
Robyn obliged her and forced her way past her fellow townsmen and women, Widow Gable on her heels. Their progress was halted halfway to the center by an impenetrable press of bodies.
“Morning, Tom,” she said to the broad young man beside her. His bare forearms were streaked with soot from the forge, and his younger sister, Lisbet, perched on his shoulders, chewing on a hunk of brown bread with single-minded intensity.
“They got Bill Gibbons,” he said, frowning at the gallows.
“Poor bastard.” Robyn shook her head to hide the relief that flooded through her at his words. Bill wasn’t her brother Michael, and for the moment that was all that mattered. “What did he do?”
“Stole a pig from Marcia. He should have known better. They’re saying someone had to pull her off him before she killed him herself.”
“Might have been better for him if they had just let her finish him off,” said Robyn.
Tom grunted in agreement. “How’s business?”
“You know how it is.” Robyn touched the lump beneath her cloak for comfort. The feud between her brother and the sheriff of Nottingham was common knowledge. They’d courted the same woman, and Michael, a fletcher, had won in spite of the sheriff’s wealth and status. Gwyneth was just the lovely daughter of a serf. Unfortunately for Michael, the sheriff’s foresters made up the bulk of Michael’s customers, and the sheriff had not forgiven him the slight. The arrows Michael and Robyn crafted piled up in their barrels while Gwyneth grew round with child and the threat of snow hovered over the distant hills.
“Look,” Lisbet said from her vantage point atop her brother.
“Look at what?” Widow Gable stretched her bony neck in an attempt to see over the crowd. Her efforts were rewarded as a scrawny figure stumbled onto the scaffold, led by a brutish man in a forester’s uniform. Robyn recognized the forester: Clovis, the sheriff’s favorite thug. He smirked as he led Bill to the noose and remanded him into the care of the waiting hangman.
“I’d like to see that bastard hang instead,” said Tom.
“Fat chance of that,” Robyn said as Clovis ripped the hood off Bill’s head and revealed the man’s pinched and hungry face. The crowd jeered. Robyn saw the hangman motion for Clovis to step back, and Clovis held up his hands in a mocking gesture of placation that set her teeth on edge. Clovis never missed an opportunity to overstep the executioner’s position.
Still, she had little pity for Bill. Poaching was one thing; stealing from your neighbors was another, especially with winter coming on. The only dissenting voice came from his wife, who screamed and pleaded from somewhere near the front of the crowd. A rotten onion flew from elsewhere, hitting Bill in the chest and splattering across his face. Another caught Clovis squarely in the jaw.
“He’ll be smelling that all week,” said Widow Gable with a cackle.
Robyn itched to be out of the crowd. Now that she was sure her brother was not at the receiving end of the sheriff’s justice, all she wanted to do was get the rabbit back to the shop and house she shared with her brother and his wife. Leaving, however, wasn’t an option. The crowd surged against her as the hangman settled the noose over Bill’s head, bloodlust whipping them into a frenzy. A pig was worth more than a man’s life with winter coming on.
“Bill Gibbons.” Robyn’s fist clenched as the familiar voice silenced the crowd, and she followed the sound to its source. There, appearing from behind the gallows and dressed in a fine surcoat of flawlessly dyed green and red wool with a sober expression on his handsome face, stood the sheriff of Nottingham. Thick hot hatred boiled up inside her at the sight of him. No one dared throw another onion; hated he might be, but here he was the living embodiment of the king’s law. She tried to tune out his voice, but the words penetrated her skull like grave worms.
“You have been found guilty of the theft of a sow by the court. As is my duty to Nottingham and to the Lord our God, I hereby sentence you to death by hanging. May God have mercy on your soul.”
Bill’s wife shrieked and flung herself at the gallows. The crowd pulled her back, aided by more of the sheriff’s brutes, and the buzz of the crowd cut off her screams as the sheriff’s hand dropped. The lever sprung; the trapdoor opened; the noose tightened with a jerk, and Bill dropped, twitching, his legs beating the air as they searched for solid ground. Robyn looked away. Death by hanging was quicker than some of the punishments meted out in this square, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch. Some citizens dealt with it by working themselves into a fre
nzy. Others, like Tom and Robyn, watched because it was required, doing their best to hide their disgust behind stony faces.
The crowd grew bored after the initial jerks faded into subtler spasms, and the crush separated into pockets of individual conversations as business resumed. Robyn overheard a group of men haggling over the price of a team of oxen, while another cluster debated the rising price of wheat.
“Well,” Robyn said to Tom, “the pigs around here will be safer now.”
“Can’t say I’ll miss him.”
“But I’m sad to see him go,” they said in unison. It was what the two of them always said after an execution, and the rote words released some of the tension from Robyn’s body. Her fists relaxed by her sides.
“Come by the forge some time,” said Tom as she turned to leave. “I’m tired of only seeing you at hangings.”
“I will. Might need more arrowheads one of these days. Keep an eye on your brother for me, Lisbet.”
Lisbet nodded around a mouthful of bread, then shot Robyn a doughy grin. The grotesque image surprised her into a laugh, but the sound of Bill’s wife’s wails stayed with her as she pushed her way out of the commons and back into the warren of streets. Merchants hawked their wares, hoping to catch the wandering attention of the dispersing crowd, and Robyn skirted around a flock of geese and their errant goose girl, a towheaded child who seemed more interested in her bare feet than her charges.
“Look lively, Maeve,” Robyn said to her, giving the child a light rap on the head.
“Ma says I’m to ask you if you want the feathers,” Maeve said, catching hold of Robyn’s sleeve.
“Tell her I’ll stop by tomorrow.”
“When’s Gwyneth having her baby?”
“Another month or so.”
“She’s so big, though,” said Maeve. “Like a goat.” She mimed a pregnant goat’s gait, holding her arms out to suggest a pendulous belly.
“Better a goat than a goose girl,” said Robyn, reaching out to give the girl another gentle cuff around her ears. Maeve ducked and darted away, scattering her flock.
Gwyneth did look a bit like a goat around the middle, Robyn thought as she ducked into the shop a few streets later. Not that she would ever say as much. Her sister-in-law sat with her legs spread to accommodate her pregnancy, which threw off the symmetry of her slender frame and caused the backaches and the headaches and the sore feet that Michael and Robyn took turns rubbing.
“There you are,” Gwyneth said. She rose awkwardly and held her belly as she embraced Robyn with her other arm. “I was about to send Michael out to find you.”
Robyn relayed the news of Bill’s execution as she gutted and skinned the rabbit for the evening meal. Gwyneth had already set the stew pot over the hearth, and it bubbled with carrots, parsnips, and cabbage from their small plot of common land, filling the room with fragrant steam. Robyn breathed it in.
“Where is Michael, anyway?” she asked, washing her hands in a bucket.
“He went to talk to Aaron at the fletcher’s guild, but he said he’d be back soon,” Gwyneth said as she helped Robyn toss chunks of rabbit into the stew. “Not that your brother understands the meaning of the word.” Her smile pushed the shadows out of Robyn’s mind, and she felt the chill left by the hanging melt away.
“It’s not like Aaron can do anything,” said Robyn, but it was hard to feel bitter about their situation in Gwyneth’s presence. So what if the sheriff hated them? They had each other, and soon they’d have the baby, and that was all that mattered.
“He told Michael he might be willing to buy some of the back stock.”
“At a loss,” said Robyn.
“A loss is better than nothing, which is what we have now. Cut that chunk up a bit more or you’ll choke on it later.”
Robyn sliced the offending piece of rabbit into smaller slivers. “Baby’s not even born yet, and you have to mother something?”
“You hardly need mothering. Keeping you and Michael alive is more like herding wild boar.”
“I’ll tell him you said that.”
“It will hardly surprise him.” She snatched the rabbit from Robyn and dropped it into the pot with a flourish. “There. It will be ready by the time he gets back, and now no one will choke.”
“We’re forever in your debt.”
“And don’t you forget it,” Gwyneth said, picking up the pelt Robyn had set aside. “This will make a nice blanket for the baby.”
“It’s just that Aaron wouldn’t know the pointy end of an arrow if it stuck him in the arse.”
“And he’s the only other fletcher in the city.” Gwyneth caught Robyn’s eye and smiled. “The sheriff has to let it go eventually. People will forget, we’ll be fine, and everyone will remember what wonderful fletchers you and Michael have always been.”
Robyn didn’t think Gwyneth believed her own words, but she couldn’t bring herself to disagree. “When did Michael say he’d be back?”
“Soon,” Gwyneth said again, shaking her head.
With the rabbit cooking and Gwyneth’s soft voice humming as she scraped the fat from the rabbit skin, Robyn allowed herself to relax, and rested her elbows on the table as she watched Gwyneth work. The cat at Gwyneth’s feet meowed plaintively.
“What?” Gwyneth said, smiling as she glanced up from tossing the innards to the tabby.
“I was just thinking that I hope the baby looks like you.”
“I hope it looks like you and Michael.” She brushed Robyn’s cheek with the back of her hand, careful not to smear rabbit blood across Robyn’s face. “Your eyes and Michael’s nose. Unless it’s a girl. Then she can have your nose too.”
Robyn wrinkled the nose in question. Both she and her brother had the same thick dark hair and hazel eyes, and Robyn also shared her brother’s height. Gwyneth barely came up to her chin, which sometimes made her feel like a lumbering ox in comparison, and other times made her grateful that she could shield Gwyneth from the threatening world with her body. “Midge says hello,” she said to change the subject. “I stopped by the mill on my way home.”
Midge, Robyn’s cousin and closest friend, had actually asked her to tell Gwyneth to push out her baby before the rest of them had to roll her around in a barrow, but Robyn opted not to relay that part of the message.
“I don’t suppose she gave you any honey cakes?”
“Robyn!” A child’s voice shouted from the shop before Robyn could answer, and then Maeve pushed through the curtain that divided the rooms and came to a panting halt before them. “It’s Michael,” Maeve said between breaths.
The blood drained from Gwyneth’s face, and Robyn’s heart stalled in her chest.
“Where?” Gwyneth dropped the rabbit skin and clutched Robyn’s hand. Blood and fat cemented their grip.
“The square.”
They ran, Robyn half pulling, half carrying Gwyneth with her as Maeve darted in front of them, throwing up clods of dirt each time her bare heels struck the street. He was at the guild, Robyn repeated to herself with each breath she drew. The guild. Not the forest. Even if he had gone hunting, they’d have to put him on trial first, and everyone loved her brother. No one on the jury would convict him. The sheriff couldn’t just hang Michael—not, she thought with rising terror, that anyone would try to stop him if he did. Beside her, Gwyneth whimpered, a high animal noise escaping her as she clung to Robyn while trying to support her belly. She shouldn’t be running, Robyn thought, but she didn’t dare slow down.
Their street opened onto the larger central road running through the city to the castle, and as before, the stalls stood mostly empty of people save for a few watchful hawkers keeping their eyes open for thieves. She could hear the roar of the crowd rising, and she looped her arm more securely around Gwyneth’s waist and picked up their pace.
People parted like soft curd as they rounded the corner onto the common. She didn’t have to elbow this time. The crowd melted before Maeve, some innate instinct for spectacle greasin
g their way until they came up hard against the rough arms of the sheriff’s foresters. Michael knelt on the ground a few feet away, his face bruised and his dark hair damp with sweat.
“Michael!”
He looked up at Robyn as his name was ripped from her throat, and she saw the mute panic in his eyes. Clovis stood behind him holding the rope that bound his wrists. Robyn tried to muscle her way past the forester in front of her. She was vaguely aware that she knew his name, but it wouldn’t come to her. All she knew was that she had to get to her brother before this nightmare went any further. “Michael,” she screamed again, slamming her forehead into the forester’s nose. She felt it crunch as he released her, howling, and she threw herself past him and onto her brother.
“Robyn,” he said as she wrapped her arms around his neck. The ground was cold and damp against her knees. She choked on all the words she might have said, her throat paralyzed with the crushing certainty of the gallows.
“Get up, girl,” said Clovis, grabbing her by the hair. She ignored the sharp pain and clung to Michael until Clovis’s boot caught her in the ribs and sent her sprawling. A second kick, this time from the man whose nose she’d broken, collided with her shoulder. The crowd fell silent as she stumbled to her feet, and the only sound was the wheezing coming from her throat and Gwyneth’s sobbing breaths.
“He didn’t do anything,” she managed to say as she regained control of her diaphragm.
“Robyn,” said Michael, shaking his head in warning. “It’s too late.”
“He was at the guild.” She was shouting, she knew, her voice rising hysterically as Clovis leered and the weak autumn sun cast unfamiliar shadows over faces she’d known her entire life.
“Robyn. Enough.” The defeat in Michael’s voice silenced her. “Listen to me. Promise me you’ll take care of them. Take care of my child.”
“Do it yourself.” She clutched her ribs. “You’re not dying. I won’t let you.”
“Tell Gwyneth I love her more than anything.”
Robyn heard Gwyneth arguing with the sheriff’s men to let her through, but she didn’t have Robyn’s height or strength, and all Robyn could see of her sister-in-law was the bright shine of her hair.
